Episode 1: Stop Guessing, Uncover What Scientists Really Need

Transcript

Matt Wilkinson

Welcome to a splice of Life Science marketing. The show for scientists who've stepped out of the lab and into marketing, learning the ropes as they go. I'm Matt Wilkinson, a recovering scientist with a PhD in chemistry that moved into journalism and then marketing. I now help companies fuse AI story and strategy to deliver pipeline and profit.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

An i'm Jasmine Gruia-Gray, a marketing leader with a PhD in molecular biology that moved into technical support, then product marketing. Now I help companies fine tune their positioning and accelerate their path to market growth. Each week, we unpack One big challenge, like getting positioning right for emerging tech, building trust with story led messaging, or knowing when to double down on brand versus performance marketing, it's 20 minutes of sharp insight, no fluff and tactics you can use straight away.

Matt Wilkinson

Let's splice things up. This week, we're going to be talking about customer needs and Jasmine. I think we're going to start today with a definition that you've found for us.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

Yes. So customer need analysis is the process of identifying and understanding what customers truly require, functionally, emotionally and contextually to solve a problem or achieve a goal. It's about going beyond superficial wants to uncover the core jobs, pain points or motivators and desired outcomes that drive decision making. It's basically answering the question, why should I care?

Learning from Steve Jobs and Clay Christensen

Matt Wilkinson

That's great. I found a quote from Steve Jobs who said, Get closer than ever to your customers, so close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves. I think it's so aspirational, and yet so often, we don't even know what they want in the first place, let alone being able to guide where they're going to want to go.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

I think that's true when you're talking about novel products, where there may not be an obvious competitor out there, but in many cases where you're talking about line extensions, for example, or follow on products, I think Clay Christensen probably has something that's relevant, and what He says is customers hire products to do a job. If you understand the job, you can design and market a product that's perfectly suited to it.

The Role of Ethnographic Research

Matt Wilkinson

I like that. It's really interesting when you start looking at the different ways that companies go about trying to understand customer needs, and very often there is an assumption that we know what it is already, and yet they don't actually go away and identify the real customer needs that they're trying to solve. And that can lead to a whole host of challenges, both from product development all the way through to not being able to get clarity on actually, how to then message. How have you seen that work both good and bad?

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

I think where there's a lot of opportunity for improvement is where marketing is isolated from product management which is isolated from R&D and there's not a strong, cohesive working group to not only listen to what the customer needs, but observe what the customer needs. And that brings up the whole concept of ethnography.

Matt Wilkinson

It's almost like you brought up one of my favourite subjects. I've done quite a few ethnography projects, looking at how do you bring in the elements of psychology and ethnography, and really being able to study customers in the wild, so to speak, trying to understand what it is that they use, and understand how do they use products themselves, and actually, what are the differences between how they explain what they're doing and how they use a product, and actually the reality that they actually do. And there's often a cognitive dissonance that really helps describe what Keith Goffin, my professor of innovation during my MBA, would always call a hidden need, and I think that's such a powerful way of being able to really understand what is it that customers are really trying to achieve when they're using things.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

Yes, I think that's a really important point. It's that hidden need. It's what is that life changing value that this product uncovers and sort of teases out what I think Steve Jobs meant when he said, you stay so close that you tell them what they need. You're so good at observing that you almost understand that life changing value before they do.

Case Study: E-commerce Transformation

Matt Wilkinson

Absolutely. I was involved in a big e-commerce transformation project, and the company had been very acquisitive, customers from lots of different segments. We were bringing together maybe 12 plus websites, differing e-commerce capabilities from different sites. Some had none. Some had others. Some had tools that would be right in one geography but wrong in another. It was a bit of a mess, but we went off and one of the big things that project started off with was actually getting really up close and personal with customers and trying to understand, one, how are they using the products, and then two, how are they buying them? And there was a lot of complexity in the products, particularly when you're talking about biological products, where there's a lot of complexity in the naming, maybe you're even defining how the codes of the oligonucleotides themselves. And so going to that level of detail, and then studying the steps that people had to go through and understand what it was that caused them stress and challenge.

So in some organisations, it was just down to the fact that, if we weren't tied into their procurement system, then being able to place an order would involve requesting a quote, then generating a purchase order, which would take 24 hours or more, because they'd have to send it off to another team, generate the purchase order, send that back, then the back and forth and the endless approval processes internally, and then communication would take maybe four or five days to actually be able to place an order. Now, of course, they weren't working that whole time, but it was still something that they had to think about and worry about getting that order placed before we even started talking about manufacturing and shipping.

So that was quite a big eye opener that when we then were able to tap into their systems and automate and play with their systems, those would take maybe, you know, you'd get that turned around in less than a day, maybe an hour. If people were sat at their computers and able to just click the button straight away to approve, and we were told, we'll never sell a piece of capital equipment through this, the first order was a six figure capital equipment purchase, because it was so much easier to transact. Now, was the sale already made? Were they already going to place it one way or another? Absolutely. But did we help reduce transactional friction massively?

And then we had other customers that would be placing orders, and they'd be copying complicated DNA code, or oligonucleotides from one spreadsheet into an order placement, copying this across placing orders. And their fear was that if they got one letter wrong, the whole order wouldn't work. And then, if it took them a while before they spotted that, that was a lot of time and effort wasted, and that would really stress out the people placing the orders. And of course, once we implemented something where they could easily reorder, that removed all of that completely. So, two different use cases, two different companies, but really being able to understand what is it that the products, and this was an e-commerce platform that we were developing. So it wasn't the product itself, but it was part of the product actually developing that was really powerful, and the stress that caused certain people was real. They really didn't like placing those orders, so the transactional friction actually put them off placing orders.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

What I really like about your examples are it helps marketers pull up, zoom out, and think about the product and the jobs to be done, not strictly from just at the bench, that interaction with that instrument or the interaction with that reagent, but think bigger picture about the full experience, including ordering.

Beyond the Core Product

Matt Wilkinson

Absolutely. And I think that we often also forget delivery, because delivery could be installation. Delivery, installation. The challenge of, if you've got complicated lists, how are you going to let people know what's in the box? Are you going to send a CD every time and get that phone away? That's not going to work anymore, because nobody has CD. Nobody has CD player. So how are you going to let people know what's in it? Is it a paper packing list that clearly, people don't want to receive tons and tons of paper? So there's a whole myriad of challenges around how do we let people know, how do we make it easy for people to not just buy the products and use it, and get to that product in use, but streamline that whole process, if it's something that people use a lot, could we even get it to the point where we're using those big bits of capital equipment to then help us place orders themselves, reorder, a bit like many of the printers that we all love to hate at home, but they tell us when they're getting low on paper, and they tell us when they're getting low on ink. These days, they're actually also starting to help us place, reorder the ink, at least.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

I completely agree. If we back up for just a second and we think about products that are on market, what are some of the problems that they can see that leads to a need to rethink, redo, the needs analysis?

Case Study: LCMS Remote Monitoring

Matt Wilkinson

I think it's really interesting in the sciences, because so often products start from a need to do, to take a specific measurement or understand a specific problem. So whether that is an LCMS system or simply a reagent challenge, and solving a specific reagent challenge, there's a very obvious job to be done from the scientific perspective. But then I think that very often we forget that beyond the research and making sure that it gets validated, reproducible results. Once we go beyond that, we often forget about, what are the pain points of people really using this every day.

I think a great example of this is, I did a project with a big manufacturer of LCMS instruments, one of the world leaders. And we were looking, this was more than a decade ago, probably 15 years ago. But we were looking at whether adding a certain set of capabilities would solve a problem. These were having the ability to connect remotely to an instrument and look at how it was working. And actually what we identified is, yes, it would help somebody identify remotely if something was working or not. But for most people, that actually just created another problem, because you could see that if you saw that it wasn't working, then that meant that you might have to go back into the office, restart things, get things going, and actually you'd lose a night's sleep. And if you knew about it and hadn't done anything about it, you'd lose a night's sleep. And if you went into the office and dealt with it, you'd lose a night's sleep. So it didn't actually solve the problem with the fact that the thing wasn't working overnight.

So it was either better not to know or to know and be able to remotely do everything that you needed to fix. And so there was almost a case of not knowing was maybe a better option in that specific instance, unless you could take a number of other actions. And so I think it's really interesting to understand, well, what are the real jobs that need to be done right here and there, and so in some labs, it's not an issue at all. Maybe if you're running samples overnight, system goes down, you just get in the next day and you run it again. But if that's continuous production, or something like that, then actually it's really quite important for you to be able to restart the thing remotely, and that's probably the bigger thing to go and do you want to be constantly thinking about checking it or not if there's a problem? Or do you want a notification when something stops working? And so there's all of these things where actually you might try and be helpful with a product addition. But actually, is that solving a problem, or does it just create or move a problem somewhere else?

Case Study: Miniaturised ELISA System

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

The example I have is a miniaturised ELISA system. That was originally positioned for sample prep up front of MALDI mass spectrometry. And the instrument did okay at the time of launch, but there really wasn't any continued growth of that instrument and increased installed base in the marketplace, which resulted in the teams, the marketing, product management and R&D teams, retrenching and looking at what were the instruments being bought for, what applications were they being bought for? And as it turned out, a small handful of customers were using the instruments to do PKPD analysis on in pre clinical on mouse samples, because this system could take such small volumes of sample, and the outcome was a fully vetted ELISA analysis. So that's what helped the team do much deeper ethnographic research and understand, really, what are the jobs to be done, and what is a much more solid application for this platform.

Matt Wilkinson

And how did that then transform the sales once you were able to reposition it?

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

That word is exactly right, transform. It absolutely did transform the platform. The platform is now being used for all sorts of bioanalytical analyses, including in the cell and gene therapy arena. So that was the tipping point to rethinking and relooking at all the application opportunities for this instrument.

Product Market Fit and Customer Discovery

Matt Wilkinson

Fantastic. It really shows that nailing product market fit is just so important. I think it's so often within breakthrough innovations that almost go to market without necessarily a clear, defined use case, that we almost leave it up to our customers to then find them. And often, I think we can assume they're either everybody's doing the same thing or at least it's a consistent set of problems that people are solving. And I think it's really interesting having seen, certainly over the last 20, 30 years, seeing the way that a certain set of techniques, such as mass spec or whatever, would start off as very much one size fits all, and nowadays they become very niche and that even if the base instrument is similar, the augmented product, whether that be the automation or the software has become so much more we're going to help you solve this problem. And I think that's really refreshing to see people do that. It has happened the same in robotics, particularly in lab robotics and all sorts of places where you're really starting to see very much we're actually looking at solving the real jobs that need to be done, rather than just looking at the holistic picture and going, here's a technology play with it.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

Completely agree. I think the key word for me is matching. I think as marketers, we need to continue to challenge ourselves to match the features of your technology with the unmet needs, match what you've got with what you're solving so that the current and future customers really can resonate with why I should care.

The Kano Model: Basic, Performance, and Excitement Needs

Matt Wilkinson

Absolutely there's a really helpful model that innovation theory looks at, developed by a gentleman called Kano, and it talks about three different types of needs. So you have those basic needs that everybody, every product in that space, needs to have. And then you have performance needs. Probably best to use the analogy of a laptop. So for many of them you might look at, any of the basic needs you need to turn it on, it needs to have a battery, a screen, a keyboard and some memory. The performance needs are those ones that you can easily benchmark against each other. So the speed. The processor, the quality the display. And then you have those things that are maybe a little bit more difficult to describe, but those things that are excitement needs. So those things that excite the population. So when people started introducing touch screens to laptops, all of a sudden, that was exciting. Having a fingerprint sensor a way of not having to type a password every time, could be exciting. And so you look at those excitement needs. But over time, of course, those excitement needs just become standard. Everybody copies them, and they become performance.

And I think it's really interesting how, even today, we're maybe seeing in certain areas, there are tools that people use, that are routine, like a PCR thermocycler, where there are still people coming up with new excitement needs that allow us to get excited about it. Even if you take the humble hot plate stirrer, once there was almost no differentiation for the temperature control and the magnet, how fast you could spin the magnet and how strong that was, all of a sudden, people did it with design, and so you could excite people by having funky designs or making them more robust against the typical spills that happened in the lab.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

I completely agree. I think, to add to all of that, I think it's marketing's job to pull through. What is that life changing value.

Matt Wilkinson

I completely agree there, and I think once you start getting into that you also start seeing that products stop being singular, and you start needing to actually create a little bit of differentiation within your own portfolio, to actually start meeting those different needs, because you start segmenting your customer base slightly differently.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

I think that brings us into a whole different area, around customer segmentation, around the ideal customer profile and customer personas, but maybe that's a podcast for a different time.

Key Takeaways

Matt Wilkinson

I think so.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

So what the three things I got out of today's chat with you, Matt was the importance of ethnography to do as much watching as listening to think about hidden needs and to put yourself in the customer's shoes and understand what that life changing value would be for them.

Matt Wilkinson

I think your story about the mass spec product that was used in a completely different way really resonated with me, and that whole story about product market fit and really understanding the customer, because the product was good, but the messaging didn't allow the right customers to find it. And I think that when we take that approach of being able to really help the customers find the solutions that they're looking for. I think we can feel that we're doing good in the world, and I think that that's what we all want to do.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray

Well, thank you all for joining us on a splice of Life Science marketing, and we look forward to having you join us and share your stories again next time. Thank you.

Matt Wilkinson

Thank you.

 

Q&A

How can I start doing ethnographic research with my limited budget as a startup?

Start by shadowing 3-5 existing customers during their normal workflow for 2-3 hours each. Focus on observing what they actually do versus what they say they do. Use your phone to record notes about friction points, workarounds, and moments of frustration. This costs nothing but travel time and reveals hidden needs that surveys miss completely.

What should I look for when observing customers in their work environment?

Watch for workarounds, repeated actions, moments of stress or frustration, and time spent on tasks that seem inefficient. Pay attention to the gap between what customers tell you they need and what their behaviour actually shows. Look for steps in their process that cause delays, errors, or require manual intervention that could be automated.

How do I identify if my product has the wrong positioning like the ELISA example?

Track which customers are actually buying and using your product versus who you think should be. Survey your existing customers about their specific use cases and compare this to your marketing messages. If there's a mismatch, or if growth is stagnant despite good product performance, it's time to investigate the real jobs customers are hiring your product to do.

What's the quickest way to understand transactional friction in my sales process?

Map every step a customer takes from initial interest to product delivery and use. Time each step and identify where customers drop off or express frustration. Interview 3-4 customers who recently purchased and ask them to walk through their buying journey, highlighting pain points. Focus on procurement processes, approval workflows, and technical implementation hurdles.

How do I convince my team that we need to invest time in customer observation?

Start with one quick ethnographic study showing clear actionable insights that could impact revenue. Document specific examples of hidden needs you discovered that surveys would have missed. Present this as risk mitigation - understanding customers prevents expensive product pivots later. Frame it as competitive advantage through deeper customer intimacy that competitors likely lack.